Tech Tips, Tricks & Trivia

This Week I Learned -  * Moonshot’s Kimi K3’s weights were released on July 27 under a Modified MIT licence, making the 2.8-trillion-parameter model available for anyone to download, fine-tune and self-host. Giving weights away is a smart distribution strategy as it could potentially turn developers, cloud providers and enterprise IT units into resellers, and make it hard for anyone to under-price you as the base model itself is free. * Jot down annoying things . AI may have a solution. * findphone is a nifty app to locate a nearby Bluetooth device by signal strength, from the macOS command line — for when Find My Phone isn't available due to MDM restrictions * ProHance is a software platform that provides real-time visibility into workforce activities, helping organizations measure productivity, optimize costs, and improve operational efficiency. It tracks employee engagement through metrics such as time spent on applications, mouse and keyboard activity, and task durations, whil...

A pangram, or holoalphabetic sentence, phrase, or word, uses every letter of a given alphabet at least once. The Pangram AI detection tool from Pangram Labs on the other hand identifies AI-generated content with high accuracy. Pangram's detection model takes a comprehensive view of a document and uses a deep-learning based detector that synthesizes millions of signals about a particular text.  From its extensive research it has identified nine patterns that occur frequently - Markdown formatting inserted into plain text contexts Overrepresented AI Phrases like "delve into" that appear far more often in AI-generated text Overuse of em dashes where human writers typically would not Bullet lists used to organize information systematically Triads like "past, present and future", grouping ideas in threes, a common AI rhetorical pattern "Not just X but Y" type of word choices and constructions common in AI writing - the best-known tic of AI writing  ...

This Week I Learned -  * Since A.I. coding tools from Anthropic, OpenAI, Cursor and other companies took off last year, one result has now become apparent: code overload . - NYT * GitHub platform activity is surging. There were 1 billion commits in 2025. Now, it's 275 million per week, on pace for 14 billion this year if growth remains linear — Kyle Daigle, COO, GitHub * At tech companies like Meta and Shopify, managers have started to factor A.I. use into performance reviews, rewarding workers who make heavy use of A.I. tools and chastening those who don’t. It has created an expensive new status game, known as “tokenmaxxing,” among A.I.-obsessed workers who are desperate to prove how productive they are. - NYT * OpenAI's agentic coding tool, Codex, had tripled its weekly active users since the start of the year. Overall Codex use, measured in tokens, has increased fivefold. Google's A.I. models processed more than 1.3 quadrillion tokens a month in 2025. * AI companies char...

This Week I Learned -  * Anthropic's Claude Code, a closed-source AI coding CLI tool, leaked ~512,000 lines of TypeScript source code on March 31, 2026, via an exposed source map in its npm package, revealing internal architecture, 44 feature flags, and 20 unreleased features; the company responded with DMCA takedowns on original copies. A developer quickly rewrote the codebase in Python using OpenAI's Codex, creating a functional derivative hosted on GitHub that evades copyright claims, amassing 29k stars and 40k forks in hours as an educational open-source alternative. This incident underscores AI's role in accelerating code replication, challenging traditional IP protections for software—Anthropic may overlook enforcement to avoid precedents that could restrict LLM training or generation of similar derived works. *  Andrej Karpathy compares LLMs to probabilistic CPUs that handle tokens statistically, in contrast to the traditional deterministic computation based on byte...

This Week I Learned -  * OpenAI's open weight models gpt-oss 20B and gpt-oss 120B support advanced reasoning and tool use. Open models are more easily customizable to build AI that can reason over your enterprise data and domains, providing a powerful option alongside proprietary models. gpt-oss can be used alone or alongside models like GPT-4o, Claude, or Llama. Built with a Mixture of Experts architecture gpt-oss delivers low-latency performance for use cases like search, chat, and real-time decisioning. It features a 131k context for long documents and RAG and it is provided under an Apache 2.0 license. * A typical software-application startup that’s not involved in training foundation models might spend 70-80% of its dollars on salaries, 5-10% on rent, and 10-25% on other operating expenses (cloud hosting, software licenses, marketing, legal/accounting, etc.).   Many of Meta’s properties rely on user-generated content (UGC) to attract attention, which is th...

There are many free and discounted certifications, software bundles, tools, services, and learning resources available for students and some for the general public too (marked with asterisk) - Oracle University is offering 5 free certification exam attempts * as part of its Race to Certification Challenge 2025 that will run till October 2025 and 3 always-free Foundation course certifications *. GitHub Student Developer Pack : Github offers Copilot Pro for free, 180 monthly Codespaces hours for cloud coding, unlimited private repositories with GitHub Pro or Team, and dozens of premium tools in the Student Developer Pack. Below is the list with a link to the dedicated landing page (where available) for that tool's GitHub student offer - Developer Tools & IDEs GitHub Copilot Student Offer JetBrains Student Pack Appwrite Student Education Plan GitLens Student Pack GitKraken Student Pack GitHub Desktop Polypane GitHub Student Bootstrap Studio Student Pack ...

Can you imagine sharing a CSV file as URL and letting the recipients view the data through just their browser? Guess what, you can do that & more with  Datasette . Click on this link to see a table showing shelf life of some perishable food items Datasette is a tool created by Simon Willison for exploring and publishing data .  It's a web application that provides a  user interface (UI) for browsing, viewing,  faceting, filtering,  sharing and exploring data .  Datasette allows you to convert CSV files into a database table . Datasette runs on top of SQLite , which is a fast, widely used database where each database is a single file that's easy to copy and back up. Datasette is designed for read-only data, meaning you can't make changes to the data through the Datasette interface. You can run your own SQL queries against the data, which is usually risky for web applications but safe in Datasette because it uses a read-only database. Datasette's JSO...

This Week I Learned -   * “Over time, the architectural diagram is mirrored in the org chart of the organization that designs and builds it.” - James Gosling , the creator of Java, refers to himself as a "Software Engineer"  *  Azure DevOps has been the end-to-end DevOps platform for Microsoft since it replaced Team Foundations Server, but in 2018, Microsoft purchased GitHub and also launched GitHub Actions. This session from PASS Data Community Summit 2023 explains how to set up a CI/CD workflow in GitHub Actions and how GitHub Actions is different that Azure DevOps Pipelines . * Real-time inference means that your deployed model is constantly available on one or several instances, ready to process any data at any moment. Using Batch Deployment rather than processing requests individually in real-time , batch processing can be implemented where data is processed in groups and stored in a database on a regular basis. Open Food Facts processed and spellchecked 10...

I got know how the open source  GPT4All  can be used as an AI assistant for personal documents that cannot be shared over the internet from open-source champion & Data geek Nikhil VJ 's  notes . With GPT4All , you can chat with models, turn your local files into information sources for models (LocalDocs), or browse models available online to download onto your device. On similar lines, Google's NotebookLM is a new, conversational research tool designed to help you organize and explore your ideas and research. It allows you to upload multiple sources like web pages, documents, and transcripts and search through them by asking questions in a natural language format. This software is best used on a desktop computer and is currently available for personal Google accounts and enterprise Google Workspace or Google Workspace for Education users. However, since NotebookLM is proprietary and not self-hostable, it may not be ideal for working with sensitive or private doc...

This Week I Learned -  * IBM has bought HashiCorp. HashiCorp Cloud Platform (the hosted Terraform, Vault, etc that HC manages themselves, their nominal secret sauce) runs on AWS today. * Venture capital firm Sequoia estimated that the AI industry spent USD50 billion on Nvidia chips used for training advanced AI models last year. But, in return brought home only USD3 billion in revenue – a concerning cost-to-profit ratio. - ET *  Teachable Machine is a web-based tool that makes creating machine learning models fast, easy, and accessible to everyone. The first version of Teachable Machine from 2017 can be used if you just want to quickly demo how machine learning works and don’t need to save anything. *  Google Family Link is a parental controls app that helps you keep your family safer online. If you're a parent, you can find your child's Android device location in Family Link once device location sharing is turned on. *  Sticker Mule 's Trace tool can e...

This Week I Learned -  *  Hard and soft skills for developers coding in the age of AI : Prompt engineering Code reviews  Testing and security  Communication  Problem solving  Adaptability  Ethical thinking  Empathy * With AI gathering context of legacy code and processes within your repositories, GitHub Copilot Enterprise can help maintain consistency and best practices across an organization’s codebase when suggesting solutions. * Parts of a URL - Source: url-parts.glitch.me *  briefsky.app is a free, open source frontend to a weather app that can be configured to use a variety of weather providers *  piped.video is a privacy-friendly YouTube frontend *  Emoji Combiner is an online tool to combine any two emojis to form an entirely new emoji. * Google Cloud was the first hyperscaler to eliminate network data transfer fees in a move to support an open, interoperable ecosystem in January 2024. Two months later, AWS responde...